Tag Archives: healing

This is a voice from my childhood, a voice that reminded me that I was too big, too sensitive, too outspoken, and too bright. The voice that put me in my place and taught me to play it small, stay in the shadows, and constantly prove my worth.

This is the voice I hear in my head now whenever I attempt to stretch my boundaries. Whether it be to accomplish my dreams or allow myself to rest, I hear myself wondering just who do I think I am.

We all have these voices inside of us, these messages that we received when we were little and internalized in only the way a child can. We gave these messages meaning, created stories and beliefs around them, and constructed our life choices from this place. As children, these were survival strategies that got us through whatever childhood challenges we faced. Survival strategies are a brilliant and intelligent way that we as human beings navigate the world. They work wonders, until they don’t. Eventually, as we feel the pull to grow and evolve, these strategies no longer work. Rather than helping us to navigate successfully through our lives, they become the source of breakdowns and pain. What once was effective is now something to be transformed.

As I sit in an attempt to stretch my boundaries of self-care and self-allowance, I am faced with my own internal strategy of performing and doing as a way to earn my worth and enough-ness in this world. What my soul needs right now is to rest and to be in a state of nothing-ness. To give myself the freedom to just be, as is, just me. What I must dance with is the extreme discomfort and tugging of that part of me that needs to keep moving and doing. The part of me that struggles to see that she is enough and her worth is her divine right. The part of me that has nothing to prove. The part of me that has kept me in constant motion, sometimes at super hero speed, to be and do everything.

And so now comes the work. The part where we must sit in the discomfort and welcome in all of the painful and uncomfortable feelings we work so hard to silence and keep away. To hold ourselves with love and acceptance, allowing the pain to arise and the feelings to be seen and expressed. To stay with this part of ourselves, for as long as it takes, as she grieves, heals, and moves forward. To have the courage to dive in and do this dance that will eventually set us free and connect us to the deeper truth and knowing.

Who do you think you are?

This voice of my childhood that has influenced my choices in staying in the shadows and playing small. This voice that has prevented me from choosing to rest and just be. This voice that was once painful and something I pushed away.

Well now… now it is a powerful voice that I welcome.

Who do I think I am??

I am Worthy!

I am Enough!

And as I sit in the vast space of nothing, I realize that I am everything.

Sometimes I wonder why it has become so difficult for us to love one another.

When I think about life, and the way we enter this world, all I can think about is love. The act of creation stemming from a state of love. The moment a newborn is held, drenched in a field of love. The reflection from a baby’s eyes, nothing but pure love. Love is our natural state, it is where we come from and what we are made of. Love is the one thing we, as human beings, don’t have to learn to do. Ok, well maybe besides breathing.

So, what happens? Why does something that comes to us as naturally as breathing become one of the most difficult things for most of us to do?

You may be reading this and be thinking that you have no problem loving at all. That you love your children, your family, your friends. Heck, maybe you even love your neighbors and a few of your co-workers. That’s a heck of a lot of people, so loving isn’t an issue for you at all. Right?

Well, you tell me.

Loving the people that we choose to have in our lives can be easy when things are going well. After all, you surround yourself with those whom you have things in common with and people that you feel good around with. When all is aligned, love can flow easily from you and hopefully to you as well. But what happens when things are not going so well? What happens when you disagree or when a loved one disappoints or hurts you? What about when the unimaginable happens or tragedy strikes, are you still in a state of love? Continue reading →

An Interview with Tiny Devotions
It isn’t often that I come by a company that I am inspired by and excited to support, so when I do, I want to share it with my warriors! Enjoy…

1. What is Tiny Devotions?Tiny Devotions is a spiritual lifestyle brand dedicated to helping our community live a mindful and intentional life. We are a sisterhood of meditating, yoga-obsessed and gem adorned free spirits, lightworkers, healers, and priestesses. We live a life devoted to our purpose and really believe in the power of rituals. We use the moon as our clock and our intuition as our compass. Our inspiration comes from the freedom of nature, and the luxury of gypset.

Another year is gone while a new year is upon us and if you are anything like most, you haven’t done much to prepare for it. Most likely, it feels like it came out of nowhere and along with it, a reminder of all the things you wanted to do but didn’t get done in the year that has passed.

Even though it may not feel like it, there are actually ways that you can create an empowering and exciting start to the new year ahead.

The new year holiday is a time for setting a foundation for the year to come. It represents a symbolic or ceremonial space where you can reflect on the year that has passed, cleanse away anything not serving you, and start fresh in a thoughtful and intentional way.

Most of us will sort of sleepwalk through this time of the year. We may randomly pick some resolutions that we feel guilty about and convince ourselves that we are going to make them a priority in the new year. Since we know that most new year resolutions don’t make it past January, we are basically setting ourselves up for failure and starting off the year feeling like shit about ourselves. And then we wonder why we aren’t achieving our goals and living the life we desire, right?

If we instead embrace this time of year as a space for reflection, cleansing, and starting fresh, we set ourselves up to feel good and in turn, to win.

Let’s face it, the bad stuff just doesn’t really feel good at all. It is not appealing to think about facing those feelings that seek to cause you discomfort and heartache. Face those thoughts that dredge up old memories. Look at those deep dark places within you that threaten to expose your most vulnerable parts. The bad stuff starts to surface and the instinct that rises to the surface is to run and find a way to make those feelings go away.

There are so many things we do to run away. There is denial, destruction, avoidance, over-indulgence, and even depression. We find whatever ways we can, whether consciously or not, to avoid having to feel all that bad crap and keep ourselves moving forward.

What makes this worse these days, is the focus on thinking positive. We have gotten to this place where everyone seems to have the same answer for anyone’s problems…”Just think positive.” It’s almost a sign of weakness or something if you make an attempt to go into the yucky stuff that may be surfacing. And yes, focus and mindset are a major component in succeeding at any goal and a big part of what I teach all of my clients.

So that begs the question of what you are supposed to do when the inevitable moments of feeling the bad stuff come up. Can you just positively think your way out of having to face them?

An interesting thing happens when you are grieving the loss of love. Facts about your life that were at one point so clear suddenly become distorted. You begin to remember things that weren’t there and forget things that were.

When my marriage ended, I was very clear about the reality of the relationship I was in. I knew in the deepest part of my soul that I was in a highly toxic situation and that removing myself and my son was the absolute best thing for us all. My knowledge of the facts was clear, so clear that I journaled my whole way through the process, providing myself written proofs of the truth of my situation.

And then time went by and somehow reality took on a new form. I would think back and only seem to remember the good times and would make those good times seem even better than they actually were. When I did recall the bad times, I would remember them as not so bad. My thought process would center around those bad times being my fault and me actually making my relationship worse than it really was. I actually began to believe that my Ex would have been a different person if I would have been different.

Eventually, in my mind, I went from leaving a toxic relationship to losing an amazing man. My mind and heart were creating a story of the past that simply was not real and delusional, and I was torturing myself at every turn.

Your marriage has ended and now it is time for you to begin learning to live a new life, a life that seems foreign, and a life that you probably felt you have been plucked into without any warning. . Whether you have ended your marriage by choice or not, having to recalibrate and learn new ways of being will be a reality for all. There will be holidays, tasks and responsibilities, places, and people that will all seem new and unreal. You will be challenged and triggered along the way as you attempt to steady yourself along unsteady ground. You will feel scared and unsure as you begin to root yourself into this new way of being. You may cry out against the unfairness of it all as you struggle to learn new skills and create new memories.

I remember being in this place like it was yesterday. I remember feeling slighted by the deck of cards life seemed to have handed me. Learning to live my life completely on my own without someone there to run things by or pick up the slack was terrifying to me. I felt lost, I felt scared, and I felt pissed. Mixed in with that was my struggle to experience life on my own, a life that kept going on, day by day, even though it sure felt to me like life should just stop right in its tracks. Every holiday that came, every person I faced, and every place that I went served as a reminder to all that I had lost and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

About 4 days after my Ex and I separated, I celebrated my 34th birthday. That painful night would mark the first of too many firsts that I would have to experience. Little did I know that hole in my chest, that feeling like something was missing, that sense of being off balance would pop up over and over throughout the next year.

Going through all of this was painful and scary, but along the way I learned and I grew. With each day that passed, I discovered tools, techniques, and wisdom that helped to empower me and make me stronger. I found a steadiness and truth that resided in my heart, and I know now, I would not have found this had I not gone through that challenging year of firsts.

And so today, I want to share what I learned so I can help you as you make your way through your year of firsts.

The period after a break-up can be the most challenging for most, it is unchartered waters. No matter who you are and how much you have prepared yourself in life, your heartbreak can be devastating and an experience that feels very heavy and confusing. As I work with women finding their way during this time, there are definite patterns of behavior that are common.

One of these patterns is the 3 most common mistakes women make after a break up:

Mistake #1 – Focusing your energy in all the wrong places.

After a break-up, it can be so easy to focus on all the things that were done “TO” you and convince yourself what a complete jerk your Ex was and is. You can find yourself obsessing about what happened and trying to figure out why it happened. You may start thinking about who or what your Ex is doing right now and feel like shit because he isn’t doing it with you.

Or on the flip side, it can be easy to say “screw it” and just totally distract yourself from feeling anything at all. You might start dating men like they are going extinct, or even jump right back into another relationship, or start drinking and partying to have “much deserved” fun.

Here’s the thing…choosing to deal with a break up in either of these ways is a huge mistake. You cannot actually heal and move on from obsessing about someone else nor can you do so by distracting yourself from the pain. The only way to the other side is to go through it and a break up is actually a freaking awesome opportunity to focus on YOU. To give yourself some extra TLC, learn a ton about who you are and what you truly desire. Take an honest look at what you need to work on, and “level up” in your life so that you can continue to grow and expand into the woman you have the potential to be.

The more time you take to focus on you after your break up, the better prepared you will be for the type of love you truly desire in your heart. The quicker you will truly be living your life of joy!

Do you struggle with knowing how to decipher your head from your heart? Do you find yourself unsure about the relationships you are in, or the ones you are considering, and have no clue what to do?Do you ignore those little instinctual feelings, the voice that gives you a warning, talking yourself out of following your own inner guidance?

There once was a time when I would have answered “Yes” to every one of these questions. I struggled in my relationships, unsure of why I didn’t feel like I could fully be myself and questioning what was wrong with me. I didn’t know how to trust my instincts and would question myself at every turn.

As you can imagine, this got me into a ton of situations that did not serve me and kept me invested in toxic relationships for far too long. I was basically sacrificing my own peace and happiness because I hadn’t learned how good relationships were supposed to feel. Convinced that it must be something I was doing wrong, I would expend so much energy and effort trying to adjust and make allowances for the things that didn’t feel good or right in my heart.

And I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt right now, that plan did not work at all. I stayed in a toxic marriage way too long and even convinced myself to attempt a reconciliation. I dated men who didn’t align with me and the journey I was on. I even created and invested in superficial relationships that didn’t serve me or the other person. I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out how I was supposed to decipher between the feelings in my heart and the thoughts in my head whenever something felt off while my mind convinced me that I must be crazy.

As I talk with clients, I see so many women struggling through the same thing when either dating a new partner or considering a reconciliation with a past partner. They find themselves confused and unclear, not sure of what they are really supposed to do.
I tell my clients that the answer to every question they can ever have is:

Learn to listen and have the courage to follow your intuition, even if it doesn’t make sense where it is leading you.

Many people believe that once you are healed you don’t have to go through the pain and struggle anymore. Like somehow you learn how to never again let anything bother you, and you can walk around happy and positive all the time. That somehow, everything simply rolls off your shoulders and you can greet every single negative occurrence in your life with a big smile on your face. If you get upset or are in a funk, then that must mean there is something wrong with you, and you have somehow fallen a thousand steps back in your healing process.

Well, it simply just isn’t true.

No matter how far along you get in your healing process and no matter how joyful and free your life becomes, you will still go through difficulties and challenges. You will get angry, upset, frustrated, and even get down on yourself. You will have moments where you want to scream and even end up in the occasional funk.

Throughout the rest of your life, you will continue to peel back layers of yourself and grow as a human into the person you are created to be. This process will straight up suck sometimes, no matter how evolved your spirit is and how on point your mindset gets. So, when you find yourself in a funk or having a bad day, it does not mean that you are going backwards or that you are “never” going to heal, it just means you are human!!